Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag
This week on the White House shitshow, the girls are rumored to be feuding, and by “girls,” I mean the president and his billionaire “first buddy.” At the center of it all, it seems, is Katie Miller, wife of Stephen and longtime top Trump adviser, who has reportedly left her post at the White House to work full-time for Musk. This probably leaves you with some questions, like, someone married Stephen Miller? And, why? Well, she did, and now she appears to have gone from a diehard Trump devotee to one of Elon Musk’s staffers. Here’s her deal.
A University of Florida graduate, Katie Miller got a master’s in public administration from George Washington University. During the first Trump administration, she served as the president’s special assistant as well as press secretary to then-Vice-President Mike Pence. Miller — née Waldman — also worked as a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security under former secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who infamously justified separating children from their parents at the border as part of the Trump 1.0 “zero tolerance” immigration policy. At the time, Miller’s soon-to-be husband Stephen — then a senior White House adviser and immigration hardliner — served as a major proponent of the policy, which separated over 5,000 children from their families without so much as a tracking process or records to help them reunite. Stephen also pushed for more draconian policies that would have separated around 25,000 more, including families in the middle of civil court proceedings and those legally seeking asylum at ports of entry. I guess that really did it for Katie!
In 2020, toward the end of her first White House stint, Katie and Stephen Miller got married. The couple apparently knew each other through their work but didn’t meet in person until friends introduced them in 2018. According to the New York Times, they got married at (where else?!) the Trump Hotel in Washington, where a senior adviser to David Friedman, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, officiated.
When it comes to immigration policies, it seems Miller is just as cruel as her husband. In a conversation with journalist Jacob Soboroff, who documented the tragic system behind the separation of families at the U.S-Mexico border in his 2020 best seller Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, Miller said her family and colleagues told her she’d “think about the separations differently” when she had kids. “But I don’t think so,” Miller is quoted as saying. By her own account, the Department of Homeland Security once sent her to the border “to see the separations for myself — to try to make me more compassionate — but it didn’t work.” Quite the flex.
Last December, Trump named Miller as one of his first picks to join Musk’s DOGE advisory board, where she served as a “Special Government Employee,” a weird little designation that allows private-sector figures to also work for the federal government in a limited capacity. (While she does that, her husband has been busy egging on ICE to amp up immigrant arrests.) Anyway, it sounds like Miller, who was until recently a DOGE spokesperson, got along pretty well with Musk — shortly after he confirmed that his own time as a special government employee has come to an end, CNN reported that she had left her White House gig to work “full-time” with him. Apparently, she’s now arranging interviews for Musk “unrelated to his time in government.”
Miller’s alleged White House exodus has added fuel to rumors that Trump and Musk are either amid or heading toward a huge fallout. Exciting! Musk’s exit came shortly after he appeared to take aim at Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill — a tax-reform package designed to provide savings to the rich and allocate more money to military and immigration enforcement at the expense of health, nutrition, education, and clean-energy programs — telling CBS News earlier this week that he was “disappointed” by the legislation, which he sees as undermining DOGE and increasing budget deficit.
The New York Times reports that Trump declined to explicitly respond to Musk’s criticisms or name him. But Stephen Miller appeared to fire back on X, where he didn’t name Musk but asserted DOGE cuts weren’t related to the spending bill and maintained that One Big Beautiful Bill will actually reduce deficit if it passes the Senate (never mind the fact that experts predict it will actually make the cost of living even worse). Hmm, I guess he and his wife aren’t exactly on the same page?
